Paul Seymour (mathematician)

Paul D. Seymour ( born July 26, 1950 in Plymouth ) is an English mathematician who made ​​important contributions to combinatorics.

Life and work

Seymour attended school in Plymouth and studied, after he had completed in the nationwide entrance exam as the first, at Oxford University (Exeter College). In 1971 he received his Bachelor in 1972 his master's degree, and in 1975 he became a PhD in AWIngleton ( matroid, Hyper Graphs and the Max - Flow -Cut Theorem). 1974 to 1976 he was at University College Swansea, then to 1978 at Merton College, Oxford, 1978/79 at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. From 1980 he was at Ohio State University in Columbus (Ohio ), where he became professor in 1983. 1983 to 1996 he was at Bell Labs (then Bellcore Labs, now Telcordia Technologies ) in Morristown, New Jersey. 1984 to 1987 he was also an adjunct professor at Rutgers University and from 1988 to 1993 at the University of Waterloo. He became a professor at Princeton University, where he was a year before visiting professor in 1996.

1983-2004 he proved in a series of papers with Neil Robertson the set of Robertson - Seymour (previously the conjecture of Klaus Wagner) in the theory of graph minors. With Robertson and Robin Thomas, he simplified the 1996 proof of the four color theorem, but still requires use of computers. With Maria Chudnovsky, Robertson and Thomas 2002 he proved the strong conjecture on perfect graphs. Moreover, he proved with Robertson, Thomas, when a graph has a flat embedding in three-dimensional space ( without links).

With Thomas and Robertson, he proved in general still open Hadwiger's conjecture from graph theory for k = 6 colors.

1979, 1994 and 2006 he received the Fulkerson Prize. In 1983 he was awarded the Pólya Prize and was Sloan Fellow. In 2003 he was awarded the Ostrowski Prize in 2004 and again ( with Robertson) the Pólya Prize. In 1994 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Zurich (Progress on the four color theorem ) and in 1986 he was invited speaker at the ICM, Berkeley ( A survey of graph minors ).

Seymour is the editor of the Journal of Graph Theory.

He has been married since 1979 and has two children.